Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Eliminative materialism (older version)

…those bright and breezy
Americanswho call themselves
Behaviourists.They declare with
some warmth that there is really nothing in their minds, and that they only
think with their muscles.

-- G.K. Chesterton,Robert Louis Stevenson (1927)

Biology is only the Fascist
substitute for sociology.

-- Arthur Koestler, Scum of the
Earth (1940)

… that faulty inferencefrom
the plausible view of the cognitive
sovereignty of sense, to the
absurd conclusion that explanatory models of human conduct must be in terms of
elements similar to ‘sensation’ or ‘stimulus’.The inference is quite fallacious, though an entire movement
in psychology (Behaviourism) is based on the failure to see this.

Abstract:The psycholytic style of current neuroscience-invoking reductionismis intellectually and philosophically
unilluminating;and the social
and political effects to which it is often putare morally debilitating.Taking ever-more-microscopic tallies of the goings-on
in neural tissuesis of interest
only to a histologist.The attempt
to press such observations into service as solvents of long-standing noëtic questionsis unsuccessful, probably in principle
so.

As Freud put it in the first paragraph of his final summary
of his own work, the Abriss der Psychoanalyse (1938), we know about the
brain on one side, and consciousness on the other, but

In the course of the Materialismusstreit …, the German
Darwinist Karl Vogtpublished a
widely read essay entitled Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft (1855), in
which he triedwith cynical
witticismto dispense with the
problem of the human soul [NB: and mind].According to Vogt, thought is a secretion of the brainjust as the digestive juices are
secretions of the stomach, bile a secretion of the liver, and urine a secretion
of the kidneys.

-- Kurt Reinhardt, Germany: 2000
Years (1950, 2nd edn. 1961), p. 594

By now, the man in the street has become acclimated to the
notion of secretions, and is unlikely to be swayed by that account.He will notice that, somehow, the liver
never secretes anything but bile, the kidneys, urine;whereas the brain ‘secretes’ such unexpected and
unprecedented and mutually contradictory things as:Catholicism, Communism, situation comedies, and the Urysohn
Metrization Theorem.

But the underlying atheist-nihilist idea, that of
wave-of-the-wand eliminativism (it
does not even deserve the name of reductionism),
whereby you eliminate the problem
from consideration, rather than doing anything to actually solve it,ever and again resurrects itself, morphing
into a semblance of life, from some discarded afterbith.

~~~ ~~

We did not have to wait for the tribe of those laboratory nihilists known as neuroscientists,
to behold an academic school dedicated to reducing free will and
cogitation to the level of meat. The behaviorists were there first.

Leonard Bloomfield, in his otherwise exemplary introduction
to the science of language (1933), spends a vapid early chapter on S-R behaviorism,
then forgets all about it and gets to work.But the prejudice was common among the American Bloomfieldians:

As Twaddell put it, to them, the
scientific method was quite simply the convention that mind does not exist.”

-- Alan Sommerstein, Modern
Phonology (1977), p. 7

In time, some linguists demurred.Rulon Wells (“Meaning and Use”, in the journal Word
1954) wrote:“In diagnosing the
conflict between mentalism and mechanism,
[Blooomfield] mislocates the issue, and thus plants his germ of truthin the sand of confusion.”(Mechanism
is here a variety of materialism.)

By now, though, it is our great good fortune that we are spared the chore of
actually reading and refuting their earlier and generally gratingly
ill-written output, since their fifteen minutes have expired(*), the
quietus marked by a famous and scathing review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, by Noam Chomsky, way back in 1959 (a good year -- aye, a vintage year).

Skinner
himself, and others of his spawn, continued to “engage in writing
behavior”.(**) And like the dragon’s-teeth of Cadmus, the doctrine
springs up ever anew, in this or that contorted form.

[(**)
The phrase was made famous by a journalist who, to test the nature of
asylum-based therapy in general and involuntary commitment in
particular, had himself commited, and immediately began acting perfectly
normal, and telling the doctors he’d like to go home. He kept a
journal of his experiences. This latter fact did not go unnoticed by
the keenly observant psychiatric nurses, who wrote in his chart,
“Patient engages in writing behavior.” An immortal and dactylic line.]

Skinner, apart from his paid occupation of making life unpleasant for rats, is best known as the author of Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971 -- not such a good year). The title echoes that of Jenseits von Gut und Böse, by that other evil troll, Nietzsche: beyond, not in the sense of uplift, but of, “Get O-o-o-vah-rit!”
-- A similar bit of titular legerdemain (sugar-coated in the title, rat
poison on the inside) was perpetrated by Patricia Churchland, in Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain (1986). What is really being proposed there is not Unity, but Anschluss, with the mind playing the hapless role of Austria.

Professor Skinner, hard at work in the lab

Again,
prior to contemporary neuroscientists, there were philosophers who
ground much the same axe. Wikipedia (s.v. “Self-refuting idea”), re eliminative materialism, speaks of identity theorists
like the philosophers Boring and Smart, who “claim that ideas exist
materially as patterns of neural structure and activity.” Now, that is
one unilluminating and bone-headed idea. By which I mean, of course, no more than that it is an unilluminating and bone-headed pattern of neural structure and activity. Owing possibly to an excess of calcium at one of the synapses.

And
why, indeed, stop short at the level of the cells, themselves already
doubtless epiphenomenal? Take it right down to quantum mechanics! Let
some gaggle of labcoats come up with the Schrödinger equation for the
Bible, and another for “Paradise Lost”, and show us how certain passages
-- excuse us, certain Hermitian forms -- of the former, lead directly
to the eigenkets of the latter. Put literary critics plumb out of
work.
(Something more than just a joke: Cf. entomologist/ultrareductionist Edward Wilson donning the robe of a Milton scholar here.)

-- A further word about
this scenario of ideas as “patterns of neural structures and activity".
It really is little more than ye olde idea of Ideas as
Pictures-in-the-head, but dressed up in a modern labcoat (the sort worn
by actors playing doctors on TV); and this is one subterranean source
of plausibility of a doctrine that on logical (and indeed theological)
grounds is a tissue of absurdity.

~

What
gives the “thought is a physical pattern” account some specious
plausibility, is our modern picture of vision: which, to be sure, is
vastly more complex than the everyman’s pre-theoretical account, whereby
the vision of an apple is like a little apple in my eye. (Compare,
indeed, the etymology of the word pupil.) -- Actually, the completely pre-theoretical account doesn’t even involve vision at all; it’s just, “Behold! an apple!” (or, holophrastically: Gavagai!)

In that account, we begin with the beheld object.

(a) It is, as a ding-an-sich,
as hopelessly unknowable in its totality as a black hole; yet like
those reticent celestial bodies -- the veiled houris of the stellar
harem -- by their corona ye may know them (that, and a bit of math).

(b) From this object -- let us take it to be specifically a coffee-cup, since we have proved the existence of these -- photons and phonons and perhaps even an occasional Higgs boson, bounce and boing and go-or-do-not-go through visual slits, in some inextricable and inexplicable quantum fashion, to wind up

(c ) landing on, and lighting up, this or that spot on the retina. From there,

(d) ganglia shiver and synapses thrill, and eventually

(e) the visual cortex receives various rude jolts, after which

(f) the rest of the brain somehow sorts it all out, until finally

(g) the mind says, “Aha! There it is! Time for a spot of java!”

Unfortunately,
this comparatively simple scenario won’t do for the generality of
ideation. It would seem that, when these reductionist gentlemen
contemplate an “Idea”,
they go no farther than an analogue of (f) or at best (g), for an
object of thought as simple as a coffee-cup (or, in their own case,
their own endlessly contemplated navel) -- the ‘idea’ of one, rather
than the image of one. -- One is reminded of Hadamard’s plaint, in The Psychology of Mathematical Invention,
that previous researchers into thought-processes had restricted
themselves to the elementary thumb-sucking mental-motions of the
Boeotians, which simply do not display the richness of thought-processes
of research mathematicians, so that his own researches had to start
from scratch.
(Similarly, generative linguistics would not have
gotten far, had it never considered sentences more complex than "John is
fat.")

For consider:

What
the cognitive eliminativists are proposing, is not that a thought
consists of some pattern of little electrochemical twitches and
irritations plus ideation
(the thinker contemplating the canvas of his own neuroprocesses, as it
were); their explicandum cannot involve the explicans. No, it is
really just -- splat -- that.

Now consider the following ideas:

(a) A topological space T is regular.

(b) T has a countable basis for its topology.

To
each of these corresponds -- in Henry’s head -- a cortical panorama (A,
B) not unlike a TV test-pattern plus static, or a Jackson Pollock
painting on a bad day.

which in turn duly corresponds to some porridge of pixels (C) on Henry's cortex. Fine, we grant that.
But
how by all that is holy do (A) and (B) imply (C)? The moreso as
Henry’s cortical idiosyncrasies differ from those of Hector (A’,
B’,C’), let alone those of the silicon-based mathematicians of the
planet Gnorf: who, whatever their physiological differences from
ourselves, must reach exactly the same conclusion as did Urysohn, since that conclusion is, in fact, a fact (laid up in heaven, where Churchlands do not penetrate, and the worm corrupteth not).

[An attempt from an entirely different direction, to reduce
the complexly interrelated richness of mathematics to triviality, by
translating it into a non-mathematical world of discourseentirely unsuited to it (in this case, the mushy one of metaphor), is Where mathematics comes from:How the embodied mind brings
mathematics into being (2000), by George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez.You can tell already by the subtitle,
that the authors are no Platonists.I did coursework with George, briefly at Harvard and later at Berkeley,
where at one point I TA’d for him;so I shall not criticize him here, lest I fall into the crime of magistricide.
Yet I must sadly concur with the verdict of the reviewer,
Terence Langendoen, in the March 2002 issue of the refereed journal Language.]

Ethicists should likewise soon be out of a job. The latest in the public press:

The End of Evil?
Neuroscientists suggest there is no such thing.
Are they right?

A word: I have no quarrel at all with the reductionist program as propounded and practiced by, say, Steven Weinberg (who embraces the term). The problem comes in with the eliminativists who do not really mean to explain things, but to explain them away.

For remarks on the ontology of attributes, and their vulnerability to the eliminativist attack, click here.

~ ~ ~

What tends to get eliminated, in these proceedings, are things like consciousness and free will
-- features of which we had grown rather fond. Their very familiarity
(as “folk theory”), for these gentlemen, somehow tells against them.
As though a good rule of thumb were, If the ancient Greeks believed it,
it must be wrong. An eternal verity gets rechristened a “stagnant
theory”.

(Extraordinary idea,
that, in any case: that to be any good, a theory must, like a
fashion-slut, annually change the length of her skirts. By that
measure, the truths of numbers known to Diaphantos must be positively
mildewed.)

Here phlogiston plays ever and again the useful role of whipping-boy. (Indeed, given the continued prominence of this ethereal etwas
in philosophical debate, it must count as one of the most fruitful
scientific hypotheses ever. If it didn’t not-exist, someone would have
to uninvent it.)

The line of reasoning, reduced to its essentials, runs: Well if that thing turned out not to exist, maybe freedom and God and all that lot are just illusions too.

One
problem with this angle of attack is that there's more to physics than
phlogiston. Also on the roster of theoretic posits we find:
acceleration, force, electromagnetism, atoms, protons … Phlogiston went
out on a limb, which broke; atoms & co. went out on a limb, and so
far it seems to have held. The eliminativists are being rather choosy
in what to highlight.

Another
problem with their reasoning is that it’s nonsense. Shooting down
this or that hypothesis of theoretical physics, or even the whole lot of
them, is not at all the same thing as denying what every mother has
been telling her children since the beginning of time. We are rather
more certain of our own consciousness and free will, than we are of
protons.

Let us examine another favorite butt
of their mirthless hilarity. Your great-great-grandsires believed in
God, and that the sun set in the west. The more fools they! We New
Atheists proclaim triumphantly that the earth circles the sun, and not
the other way about. Therefore, everything else you believe is false as
well.

But in point of fact, you
haven’t got much further along by taking the sun as the rest-point of
your dynamical system, than when you stood firm on the earth. For now
you may be held to depict a system in which the entire galaxy whirls
lumbrously around the axis of a single, peripheral, faint star.

In
reality, none of these choices of a reference frame intend the
absurdities ascribed to them. Each has its use for some purpose or
other. Grandpa was well within his rights, both cosmologically and
theologically.

All biochemists and molecular biologists today are ‘mechanical materialists’.

J. Maynard Smith & E. Szathmáry, The Origins of Life (1999), p. 11

Probably
no harm in that, so long as the molecularists stick to their last, and
don't go sounding off in the Sunday supplements about matters that
concern them not; indeed, it would be more concerning, were they all
Cantorian Realists, or Presbyterians. But the day when all
musicologists, or mathematicians, or literary critics, take mechanical
materialism for their lodestar and touchstone, is the day when we shall
cease to learn anything of interest about music, math, or literature.

~ ~ ~

We earlier glanced at the program of consilience,
which (speaking somewhat informally) depicts the sciences stacking up
one atop the other, like proverbial pancakes, while the life-giving
maple syrup of shared method and ontology, seeping from one to the next,
unites them. (That summary, while not perfect, is both more concise
and somewhat clearer than what you may glean from scattered passages in
Wilson’s book.) Eliminative materialism takes all this a step further:
the whole stack is squashed flatter than flat (again, the individual
pancake has passed into legend for this very quality) into an inedible
paste: the which, however, is declared to be the sole reality, things
like syrup and pats of butter being just figments of your imagination
(which itself does not exist). Understandably, this philosophy was
quite popular among the guards at Belsen-Belsen.

That may sound harsh, but truly, the often creepy frisson
of the behaviorist/neuroscientific mindset does recall certain
experiments during that unlamented Reich which were better left undone.
Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p. 19, on the founder of American Behaviorism:

Watson presented a baby with a white rat, and then clanged a hammer against an iron bar, alledgedly making the baby associate fear with fur.

Thus, to all our weightier indictments against Nominalism in all its forms, we add this slogan:

“Behaviorists Hate Bunnies.”

(Our own favorite behaviorist, jolly Dr. Quine, does suffer from a certain lagomorphobia, in his obsession with "undetached rabbit parts", documented here.)

…the
deep, saprophytic, basidiomycetic penetralia of the soil …. the
sanctity of the physiological caste system; the evil of personal rights
(the colony is ALL!); … the aesthetic pleasure of eating feces from
nestmates’ anuses after the shedding of our skins; and the ecstasy of
cannibialism … (it is more blessed to be eaten than to eat).

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p. 148

This
is jolly stuff, skillfully done; probably give Donald Trump a stiffie.
Yet one senses a sour note, as the (“consilient”) goal of the
eliminative materialists is to provide a similar account of human morality, decency, caring, flights of fancy, love …. Ever again and inevitably, these proctoscopists return to the anus, the central life-ring (Lebenszirkel) of their Weltanschauung.

~ ~ ~

To
be fair to the reductionist program, let us briefly consider a proposal
narrated by Wilson, who is both a much more graceful writer and a more
congenial companion than Skinner or the Churchlands.

Wilson
offers one worked-out example of basically eliminative reduction (or
‘consilient’ explanation): from oneirology straight down to
biochemistry. Here is a sketch of the bad old days of Freud:

Mysticism
and science meet in dreams. … When we sleep, the ego releases its grip
on the id… Freud … -- to put it as kindly as possible -- guessed
wrong.

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p. 74

Wilson
is in fact a kind and temperate man; that mild rebuke is as
strongly-worded as anything in the book. (He is even able to discuss
the Postmodernists without resorting to scatological invective, a task
far beyond my own capacities.)

But now (p. 75) for the good news:

The competing and more modern hypothesis of the basic nature of dreaming is the activation-synthesis
model of biology. … Sleep descends upon the brain when chemical nerve
cell transmitters … such as norepinephrine and serotonin, decline in
amount… Simultaneously a transmitter of a second kind, acetylcholine,
rises in amount. …

Etc., etc.; we skip to the exciting climax on the next page:

The
electrical membrane activity, still mediated by acetylcholine at the
nerve junctions, moves from the pons (the P of PGO), a bulbous mass of
nerve centers located at the top of the brain stem, upward to the lower
center of the brain mass, where it enteres the geniculate nuclei (G) of
the thalamus, which are major switching centers in the visual neuronal
pathways. The PGO waves then pass on to the occipital cortex (O), at
the rear of the brain, where integration of visual information takes
place.

Voilà ! Any questions? No? We're done then.

Oh
dear -- did I type all that up aright? Was it not perhaps the
serotonin that flows into the thingummy, thereby (de)activating the
thalamo-geniculo-pataphysico reaction? Well, no matter; for you will
notice that we have so far learned absolutely nothing about actual
dreams.(*)

(* Don’t misunderstand:
this is sound, painstaking work, and it is excellent that someone is
doing it. No doubt it will prove crucial to some hyperspecialists in
the approriate microcompartment of biochemistry. For the general man of
science and letters, on the other hand, it is precisely as fascinating
as the mysteries of the pancreas.)

This lacuna Wilson hastens to remedy by rushing in with his own broad-brush description, eclipsing that of that bungler Freud:

We
fly through the air, swim in the deep sea, walk on a distant planet,
converse with a long-dead parent … In dreams we are insane. We wander
across our limitless dreamscapes as madmen.

Hm.
Doesn’t ring a bell, either with my own experience or that of friends
with whom I have discussed such things. In my own dreams, I tend to
be at work, or in a classroom, or (oddly) at some sprawling party on the
grounds of a great country house. No flying through the air; more
like, irksome difficulties catching the right bus. But let that pass.
No doubt spending your days as a reductionist means you must
compensate with florid fantasies at night.

But
the real killer is that last line. It is, I believe, wildly and
crucially false. The real mind-set of the typical dreamer was captured
perfectly by Louis Carroll: Alice retains her level-headedness, while
all around her are acting fantastically, and she rather taxes them for
their behavior. (A similar depiction occurs in the long-running comic
strip, "The Strange World of Mr Mum". The eponymous everyman wanders
bemused through the strangest situations.) What the dreamer beholds may resemble the visions of psychotics: yet the dreamer is not psychotic. In our dreams we remain our real selves: we retain, in particular, our unbanishable morality,
not doing in dreams what we would not do or at least fantasize doing in
waking life. (Morality: a word anathema to some of these gentlemen --
though here Wilson himself is sound enough -- yet it survives the
oneiric lysis, as it shall survive their nihilism.) We remain
perfectly rational, only…. just not at our best. For instance, in
dreams I often work out etymologies, or expound mathematical ideas.
These are without exception in error -- hey, happens to the best of us
-- but that is what I do, I don’t imagine I’m a prophet, or a giant cockroach, or that everyone is out to get me, or what not.

Freud may not have nailed it, but you’ll learn more about actual dreaming from Die Traumdeutung than from this ultrareductionist stuff.

That only somewhat
facetious polemic brings me to another point. While specialists of
this or that stripe may want to drill down to the last detail, what
most of us require -- expressing this somewhat provocatively -- is an
explanation that is as shallow as possible, in that it digs down only as far as it needs to, to clear things up a bit. (Compare Quine's "Maxim of shallow analysis: Where it doesn't itch, don't scratch.")
And even if you wind up doing a deep-dive yourself, what you
intellectually retain is likely to be an explanatory skeleton.

Thus, take mathematics. When a proof is truly “irreducibly reductionist”
(to coin a phrase), like that of the Four-Color Theorem, where
intermediate guiding Ideas, of general application, do not emerge, but
everything is tediously and computationally broken down into a
bad-infinity of special cases, mathematicians are disappointed and
frustrated. What we want ultimately is an agencement of Leading Ideas. We might dutifully check the details of the proof, but these we shall probably not retain.

(Keynes, whose Treatise on Probability
brims with Leading Ideas, charmingly prefaces one particularly
symbol-ridden chapter with absolution for any reader who wishes to skip
it. “We do it, to show that the thing can be done; the exercise is
more for the benefit of the writer, than the reader.” [Quoting from
memory, so you might not be able to Google that.])

So, suppose we wish to know what
launches birds or butterflies on their migrations. What we hope to hear
about is an account in terms of concepts antecedently familiar or at
least learnable without too much fuss -- things like average
temperature, extremal (trigger) temperature, average length of daylight,
or depletion of ambient foliage. Or, how do they find their way. We
are prepared for an explanation in terms of magnetism, starlight, or
even “an instinct, varying in its details from species to species, whose
guiding factors are as yet unknown”. In the first-named case, we are
open to talk about iron molecules in the inner ear; but if the account
in inextricably entangled in the details of the cross-effects between
the ornithoboson cycle and the L-dextro-retro-feniculation mechanism,
it’s TMI, and we tune out. A ‘molar’ elucidation suffices for the
general public and for the general zoologist (and indeed, even this
much is often too much to ask in practice; apparently major mysteries
remain about many migration-patterns, including the celebrated case of
the Monarch butterfly).
An avian histologist might want to know more about those iron particles
and their interaction with the inner ear. But at some point even he is
satified to call it a day, content to say, of levels yet further down,
The Thing Can Be Done.

Now, sometimes, perhaps usually, no such shallow-draught
explanation will be forthcoming. Thus, the saga of individual animals
gets you only so far towards the understanding the appearance and
disappearance of species; a lower-level unit, the gene, turns out to be
quite handy; and to further understand the behavior of these, we occasionally have to get down among the DNA.

Consider
further, the symmetries of snowflakes. The usual explanation is
straightforwardly intuitive, local and deterministic. But somehow I
don’t buy it. It just feels as though such endlessly varied detail,
with symmetries nonetheless rigidly enforced, brewed in a whirling
cauldron of stochastic accident, must have some energy-minimizing
post-editing -- something global (or “holistic”, if you like that word)
along the lines of surface tension, or of standing waves on tympani. In
which case you’ll be dragging in Bessel functions, or calculus of
variations, or quantum mechanics. And in that case snowflakes will be
one of those phenomena that can barely be intuitively understood. In
this, it would join ranks with what may be a host of questions that Homo
sapiens will never really understand. -- This is the Mysterian
stance. Believe it or not, this is also the orthodox
Judeo-Christian-Muslim position towards the ultimate unknowability of
the mind of God -- certain TV preachers and football coaches to the
contrary.

So:
Reduce as you can and as you must, but not for its own sake.
Practically, cognitively, there is a price to pay. The naturalist
tracking an ecosystem knows he may need to have recourse to natural
selection, perhaps to geology, a bit of statistics -- but it’s not as
though he can’t wait to get his hand on the string theory of the thing.

Or consider the case of generative
syntax, which over the years has dug ever deeper, and become
increasingly abstract in its ontology of explanation, drifting further
and further from categories familiar to Jespersen. Yet it did this, not
out of any fetishism for
abstraction, nor reductionism for its own sake, but rather because
earlier, more traditional and intuitive attempts just did not work.
Indeed, the principle figure behind this sweep of developments has also
consistently been in the forefront of debunking popular but vacuous
styles of reductionism.

~ ~ ~

Again,
to be fair, let us quote a man whose mind we entirely admire, whose
prose sparkles like dew-bedecked blooms at break of dawn. None other
than -- but you have already guessed -- the master himself, Mr. Willard
(“Van”) Orman Quine:

Corresponding
to every mental state … the dualist is bound to admit the existence of a
bodily state that obtains when and only when the mental one obtains..
The bodily state is trivially specifiable in the dualist’s own terms,
simply as the state of accompanying a mind that is in that mental
state. Instead of ascribing the one state to the mind, then, we may
equivalently ascribe the other to the body. The mind goes by the board,
and will not be missed.(*)

(*In
fairness to Quine, let us hasten to add, that his core concern here is
quite abstractly ontological, even quantificational, as befits a
symbolic logician. It may even be compared to the notion, not of
dualism, but of duality, in
mathematics, being related rather like the positive and the negative of
a photograph, where either one will do. -- Still, his chosen
periscopic viewpoint leads to some no very edifying reflections: “Mental
states, construed as states of nerves, are like diseases.” And such
reasonings spawned venomous afterbirths with Dennett and the
Churchlands.)

This nifty epiphany casts our Quine into
something of a Little-Jack-Horner state (= excitation of synapse
#5328b), for (coming to his senses) he straightly confesses that “this
effortless physicalism smacks of trickery”. Yet what he says is true
enough. -- True… enough,
for sake of argument; that no such isometric reduction has ever actually
been made and perhaps never will, is beside the present point. Let us
grandly grant it done; Nobels all round, lads! What then? Well, then, nothing. We are back where we were.

For:
every carpet has an underside. We may even concede (perhaps
over-generously) that both sides are interderivable: given the one, you
can work out the other. Now, you and I prefer the upper side, where
green birds are depicted in an azure sky, and the prince urges his
huntsmen forward in the chase. Equally -- and it is their right, --
the proctoscopic philosophers prefer to ogle the underside, an unintuitive tangle of knots and loose ends. You and I can observe why
the green beings appear on a background of blue; whereas the
proctoscopists can only stare miserably at their welter of circumanal
shorthairs.

Such, indeed, is the case most
favorable to the proctoscopists, where we are concerned only with a
single static pattern. Consider now -- well, our old friend, the Urysohn Metrization Theorem.
All the proctoscopists can do, in trying to wrangle with that, is to
examine the brains (not, note: the thought processes) of actual people
trying to wrangle with it, since the theorem itself is incorporeal.
(Compare the Competence:Performance distinction, in linguistics. Recall
as well the unprofitability of obsession with the latter.) And
granting our epistemological vivisectionists superhuman abilities far
beyond the offing of likelihood, they will be able to peer into everybody's brain-pan
and inspect the various chemical blurps, electric fizz, and meandering
fat-globules of the would-be topologists. Yet worse, far worse for
their case -- even granted their ability to somehow read off, from this
mephitic brew, such messages as “SMITH - NOW - CONSIDERING -
FIRST-COUNTABILITY. UH-OH, SMITH SAD. MEBBE FIRST-COUNTABILITY NOT
ENOUGH. OH NOES!!”, -- they will be not a whit closer to understanding
the theorem. For their data-set consists of all the various blunderers
of the earth, barging about, running into dead-ends, committing
fallacies, thinking they’ve proved it whereas in reality (victims of a
misfolded protein) they did not -- really one would like to see Monty
Python work this one up into a skit. (They did the complete works of
Marcel Proust; why not Urysohn?) For the truth
of the theorem resides, not in the cloaca which these gentlemen are
pleasured to inspect, but in the realm of Invisibilia, the kingdom of
the Lord of Hosts. And the valid
mathematical moves made by this or that fallible incarnated creature,
in their groping attempts to approach the truth, gain their validity,
not from thermodynamic or statistical considerations, but from our
miraculous harmony with such abstract truth itself, which stems, we know
not whence; though some of us have an inkling.

That,
technically, one might perform such fundamental (or rather
fundament-level) analyses or rather catalyses, shows only that it is
possible, by the wrong sort of reduction, to reduce meaningful phenomena
to the meaningless. We may dub this excretory reduction, as opposed to explanatory reduction. And the craft practiced by these proctoscopic coprophiles, we may dub stercochemistry. (Not a typo, that: sterco-, not stereo-.) Indeed, in this perspective, we notice that the doctrine of -- eliminative materialism, is singularly well-named.

(1) Your knowledge -- no rather, your direct experience -- of your consciousness and your free will, are more certain than are any apparent perceptions of alleged external phenomena, let alone arcane arguments built upon a selection of supposed laboratory results.(2) Whoso, then, alleges these central facts to be a fraud, is a charlatan, or worse.

As for your sanguinary symptoms (by no means uncommon when encountering novel expressions and new ideas), try a beer -- it’ll stop the bleeding.

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The first novel-length story featuring the Murphy Bros.

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

It contains stories previously published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock, as well as new stories never before published. Click the cover to download it to your Kindle now!

About the Author

David Justice studied French at the Sorbonne, mathematics and physics at Harvard and MIT, and math and linguistics at Berkeley.He is the author of The Semantics of Form in Arabic, in the Mirror of European Languages; and of the fictional worksI Don’t Do Divorce Cases (which includes stories originally published in Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine) and Murphy on the Mount. He taught French at Berkeley, and linguistics at the University of Alberta, then worked at Merriam-Webster as Editor of Etymology (where he edited Webster’s Book of Word Histories) and as Editor of Pronunciation.He subsequently was editor-in-chief at Franklin Electronic Publishers.He is currently employed as a language analyst, and consultant for the University of Maryland. He lives with his bride of forty years, overlooking a peaceful lake.